Exploration On A Budget

Even In A Cost-conscious Era, Nasa's Goal Remains To Send Humans To Mars

July 18, 1999|By Jeremy Manier, Tribune Staff Writer.

Three decades after Neil Armstrong's historic stroll on the moon, the enduring legacy from the Apollo missions is of a breathtaking endeavor that defined the summit of human achievement-- and then suffered from the anticlimax of the century.

Contrary to hopes, space travel remained an enormously expensive, risky proposition. Rather than sending astronauts to explore new worlds, America put its resources in the space shuttle--a vehicle that circles our planet for the price of nearly $1 billion per launch.

Without the foundation of Cold War propaganda that fueled the space program of the 1960s, today's manned space program seeks its justification in scientific discovery, commercial applications and peaceful exploration with other nations. Even those aims, some critics say, could be accomplished for less cost by increasingly sophisticated robotic probes.

What has been lacking until recently, most experts agree, is a realistic plan to fulfill the scientific potential of the manned space program, while expanding the outer boundaries of humanity's daring incursion into the starlit void.

The pattern of costly underachievement might seem to continue with the newest flagship of manned space flight--the $40 billion International Space Station, under construction in Earth orbit. Officials at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration argue the controversial project will help reclaim momentum lost after the moon missions.

And the barrage of robotic probes sent to Mars since 1996 leaves little doubt about the space agency's ultimate goal: landing humans on the Red Planet.

"If you look at the history of explorers, they established outposts and continued to push out from there," said Michael Hawes, the new director of the space station project at NASA. "The unfortunate part of the Apollo program is that we went to the moon without establishing anything. Now we're building the outpost."

NASA planners see promise in the station as an outpost for future space-based research. Medical data from astronauts posted on the station may yield invaluable lessons on how to keep people healthy during future lengthy missions far from Earth. Such long-term research also could explain why astronauts lose bone mass in space, then grow it back upon return to Earth--a process that may hold the key to understanding osteoporosis among full-time Earthlings.

Getting people to Mars, meanwhile, may be the only way to check the truth of a 1996 paper by NASA scientists who claimed to have found traces of past life in an ancient meteorite from Mars.

"If there's life on Mars now, chances are it's living deep within the planet surface," said astronomer Steven Squyres of Cornell University. "You'll have to have humans on the scene to do the drill work. I just don't think robots alone could give you everything you'd want to know."

Some critics question whether epic manned missions are necessary to fill the "inspiration gap" that followed Apollo.

The Pathfinder probe to Mars in 1997 proved hugely popular despite its lack of a human crew, said Alex Roland, a professor of history at Duke University and a former NASA historian. Given the inhospitableness of space and relative cheapness of unmanned probes, Roland said, it may make sense to let our robots take the glory for the foreseeable future.

"This kind of debate isn't new," Roland said. "In the middle of this century, there was great enthusiasm for colonizing the bottom of the ocean to get more space or grow more food. We haven't done that either, for the simple reason that there isn't anything there that's worth trying to sustain people. That's basically where we're at in space, nonetheless we plow ahead."

Even boosters of the space program sense they need a better rationale for putting people into space than the oft-repeated observation that "machines don't get ticker-tape parades."

One powerful advantage of people, experts say, is that they simply can do much better science in space than robots.

That argument comes from one unlikely source: Squyres, a leader of the Athena robotic rover and sample return mission, slated for launch to Mars in 2003.

The issue crystallized for Squyres one day in April when his team went to the Mojave Desert to test a prototype of their machine, which will be about three times bigger than the plucky Sojourner rover from the Pathfinder mission and will have at least 10 times the exploring range.

"I would watch what the rover would do, then make a note of what my geologist friends were doing nearby," Squyres said. "And I realized that what one rover can do in a day, a good, trained geologist can do in maybe 30 seconds."

But in this day and age, good scientific objectives won't necessarily boost NASA's budget, which now accounts for less than 1 percent of federal outlays--an ego-bruising drop from its 4 percent slice of the budget 30 years ago.